Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  Perched like a crane over a pot of sputtering peanut oil, the elfin seventy-something-year-old with the hair-trigger laugh chases two rusty brown thighs around a cast-iron, coffin-shaped cookpot, snags them with a pair of tongs, plops them onto a flattop griddle to keep warm, and then pivots, reaching into a black bus tub filled to the brim with breasts, thighs, wings, and legs, all sheathed in a viscous, chalky, blush-colored batter. As he lowers the next batch, the oil burbles and spits, and Bonner deflects my query with weary aplomb.

  “Now you know I can’t tell you what’s in the batter,” he says with a smile. “You ate the recipe… People done tried everything in the world to get that recipe, but grab the tub and run. They call up and say they’re with the health department and want to know what all I put in that batter. Some of them say, ‘You got cocaine in there, don’t you?’ I told them same I’ll tell you: Ain’t no drugs in there. Only thing you’re addicted to is that fried chicken.”

  Gus Bonner’s family has been selling fried chicken since 1950. And since that first day his stepmother hefted a skillet to the stovetop, admiring customers have beaten a path to their door, in search of the secret to the chicken’s subtle heat and ruddy, brittle crust.

  For some the path beaten was to the back door. “At first the white folks came around back to get their chicken,” recalls Gertrude Bonner, his wife of thirty-six years. “But that was back during segregation, back when black folks had to go to the back door to get a barbecue over at Bozo’s,” she says, referring to the white-owned barbecue restaurant across the highway.

  Today more than three-quarters of Bonner’s customers are white. Most are pilgrims of a sort, inveterate eaters on the trail of the perfect piece of fried chicken. After years of searching, of eating their way through a barnyard full of fowl, they find their way to Mason, Tennessee, and to Gus. Gus feeds them, accepts their compliments, sips his beer, smokes his cigarette, and waits.

  “You see that sign out front?” Bonner asks yet another admirer who had sidled up to the counter. “It says ‘Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken.’ We’ve had folks from Russia, Cuba, Iran; you name it. All of them just alike, just like you. They all want that recipe. Ain’t no difference one from the other, black or white, can’t none of them get this recipe unless they’re willing to pay big money… Now go eat your chicken; it’s getting cold.”

  HIGHWAY 70 / 901-294-2028

  Memphis

  PIGGLY WIGGLY

  Until Memphis native Clarence Saunders came along, grocery shoppers presented their written orders to clerks, who then gathered goods from the store shelves. Saunders, a man obsessed with innovation and efficiency, tried something new back in 1916, equipping shoppers with baskets and opening the shelves to browsers. It was, in essence, the first self-service grocery store. And, for reasons still unclear to all, he chose to call his new retail venture Piggly Wiggly.

  By the 1920s there were Piggly Wigglys scattered from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to San Francisco, California. Alas, the Depression hit Saunders hard, and soon he had lost control of his burgeoning grocery empire. Piggly Wiggly grocery stores continued to thrive, but without the Saunders’ involvement. Undeterred—perhaps smarting a bit from his business failure, maybe buoyed by a touch of megalomania—Saunders returned to the scene a few years later with a chain of groceries called Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Stores, which were, for a short time, successful. He was back again in 1937 with an automated concept called the Keedoozle, as in Key Does All. It, too, was initially successful, though plagued by repeated mechanical failures. When Saunders died in 1953 he was working to open a new retail prototype, a fully automated precursor to the fast-food restaurant, to be called Foodelectric.

  An early self-service Piggly Wiggly grocery.

  CALVARY WAFFLE SHOP

  Jane Barton, whom everyone seems to call the Mayonnaise Queen, has been on her feet since 4:30 this morning. Her gray hair is fashionably coiffed. She wears a paisley smock over Bermuda shorts. Her reading glasses dangle from a gold herringbone necklace. This is her forty-ninth year of service at the Waffle Shop, a Lenten-only canteen set in the basement of Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. “I’ve been making mayonnaise for forty-five of those years,” she says. “I took over when the lady who was supposed to make it broke her leg.”

  Service to Calvary by local belles is a long tradition. The ladies tell of the early years, back in the late 1920s, when the shop bordered an alley known as the Whiskey Chute, the water for washing and drinking was drawn from corner hydrants, and cooking was done on coal stoves. They talk of the grande dames of their day who dressed for midday services in couture and heels but descended to the basement kitchen postsermon, donning protective rain slickers, and stirring up waffles and chicken hash, corned beef and cabbage, shrimp mousse, fish pudding, and tomato aspic, the latter three embellished with a niggardly flourish of homemade mayonnaise.

  The waffles alone are worth a pilgrimage. Cooked on home kitchen irons by a crew at the rear of the dining room, within sight of inspirational plaques with messages like “Bloom Where You Are Planted,” they are vaguely sweet and almost crisp. Drenched with Calvary hash, a brown sauce stew of dark-meat chicken, they earn a place in the pantheon of comfort foods. But the ladies-who-lunch salads are the exemplars. Order a jiggly wedge of tomato aspic topped with a cotton boll of chicken salad and you will taste the best of white-glove cookery. Plus, they seem to be a bit more generous with the luxe mayo when you order that double-decker.

  One more thing to keep in mind: In 2004 Thomas Pavlechko, Calvary’s choir-master, premiered his “Ode to the Calvary Waffle Shop.” Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, it includes such memorable stanzas as:

  Waffles with sausage and hash made with chicken,

  Historic foods that we serve from our kitchen;

  Creole with shrimp and some giblets with rice,

  Gumbo and turnip greens: isn’t that nice?

  On a recent visit, I was lucky enough to eat aspic as Pavlechko banged out the tune on an upright Kimball and the voices of the congregation rose in tribute.

  102 NORTH SECOND STREET / 901-525-3036

  PAYNE’S

  Local belief holds that in 1922 a man by the name of Hueberger, proprietor of the eponymous Leonard’s on South Bellevue Avenue, invented the Memphis-style barbecue sandwich: chopped pork shoulder doused with a sauce, capped with a bit of coleslaw, and served on a cottony bun.

  Well, if ol’ Leonard invented it, then Emily Payne perfected it. Since 1972 she’s been dishing out pluperfect pork shoulder sandwiches capped with a mustardy hot-and-sour slaw.

  I can still recall my first visit to Payne’s. Located on a forlorn stretch of old Highway 78 and housed in a barely converted filling station, the place showed great promise. I stepped inside. Smoke hung in the air like a fog. The interior was bare, with all the physical and acoustical charm of an elementary school lunchroom. A few tables hugged the side of the building where the grease pits once were. No foolishness at all here, just barbecue. It was lunchtime, the line was to the door, and I was primed to experience the mythical Memphis barbecue about which I had heard so much. I ordered a sandwich. It was cheap, dirt cheap. My spirits and expectations rose. Hell, I was almost giddy. I clutched my number like a talisman and grabbed a Coke from the machine.

  Behind the counter I could hear the whack, whack, whack of a cleaver on the cutting board. Okay, so it was chopped instead of pulled. I could accept that. After all, this was Memphis; they do their barbecue a little differently than where I grew up. No matter, at least it was prepared to order. Barbecue dies a miserable death on a steam table.

  And then my number was called. The sandwich I retrieved from the counter was huge. Despite a bun the size of a good-sized hubcap, little bits of barbecue had escaped their white bread trappings and were scattered about the flimsy paper plate. Also scattered here and there were seemingly errant bits of coleslaw, but I could forg
ive them a little sloppiness; barbecue restaurants are concerned with product, not presentation.

  This former filling station dishes out one of the best barbecue sandwiches in the land.

  I could not forgive them my next experience: I removed the top of the bun, and recoiled in horror. Right there, smack dab in the middle of a perfectly good barbecue sandwich, some fool had put a mess of coleslaw—not on the side, where God intended it to be, but on the sandwich.

  Now don’t get me wrong; I like slaw. In fact, coleslaw runs a close second to Brunswick stew in my hierarchy of barbecue needs. Oh well, there was little to do but sink my teeth into this heresy on a hamburger bun. Despite myself, I liked it. The meat was well charred and juicy. Little chunks of blackened outside meat added texture, smoke, and the bite of pepper to each morsel. The tomatoey sauce brought with it the welcome heat of red pepper, and soon I was sweating like a stuck pig.

  I even warmed to the slaw. This wasn’t some sugary, mayonnaise-sodden collection of cabbage. This stuff was assertive in its own way, tasting of vinegar, mustard, and black pepper. It might have tasted better on the side, but since it was already there, I knuckled under.

  To tell the truth, I did more than knuckle under. Two days later, I returned to Payne’s and, fully aware of what was in store for me, ordered yet another coleslaw-topped sandwich. In the intervening years I have returned many times, and though I still yearn for the unadulterated sandwich of my Georgia youth, my culinary soul is now rested; I’ve learned to adapt.

  1762 LAMAR AVENUE / 901-272-1523

  COZY CORNER

  In Memphis locals like to debate the relative merits of wet versus dry ribs, with those in the dry camp almost invariably touting the Rendezvous as the high holy house of the dry sect. Don’t believe the hype. Though Rendezvous founder Charlie Vergos may well have been the originator of the dry style when he took to sprinkling a spiked Greek spice mix over his charcoal broiled spare ribs, Ray Robinson Sr. stole his thunder back in 1977 when he opened this little spot in a rundown shopping center just east of downtown.

  Behind the counter his wife, Desiree, can usually be found sitting on a high-back swivel stool, within easy reach of a Rube Goldberg smoking apparatus and a stack of order pads. Inside the restaurant’s custom-built Chicago-style smoke box hang link sausages, baloney, ribs, Boston Butts, and, believe it or not, Cornish game hens. Though every smoked item on the menu is tasty, I go for the rib ends. Usually reserved as cooks’ treats, these little nubs from the end of the slab are crunchier and smokier than the rest. That is not to say that every darn dish that emerges from Robinson’s smoke box is not a paragon of the smoked pork art. It is.

  What is more, Cozy Corner is a grand example of the positive culinary effects of the ongoing reverse migration of black Southerners, who, after years in exile, head home, no doubt salivating over the prospect of tasting an honest slab of ribs. Robinson spent his time in barbecue-bereft Denver, Colorado, before returning to Memphis, his birthplace. I asked him one day why he came back. “It was cold up there, son,” he said with a sly smile. “It was real cold.”

  745 NORTH PARKWAY / 901-527-9158

  THE BAR-B-QUE SHOP

  Mention barbecue spaghetti outside of Memphis, the town of its origin, and you will get a blank stare or a poor attempt at humor: “How do you keep the little noodles from falling through the grill?”

  As served in more than twenty restaurants here, barbecue spaghetti is a simple side dish, served in lieu of beans or slaw: well-cooked noodles are combined with barbecue sauce, the requisite “unknowable ingredients,” and variably, a bit of smoked pork shoulder. Ask Bar-B-Que Shop proprietor Frank Vernon what makes his the best and he begins to recite a brief history of barbecue spaghetti:

  “I learned from Brady Vinson. Brady was a railroad cook back in the ’30s and ’40s before he settled back here in Memphis. When he was traveling, he started to experiment with the different foods he came across. Guess that’s how he started combining barbecue and spaghetti at his place called Brady and Lil’s. That was back in the early ’50s. Brady, he was real secretive about how he made everything—especially the spaghetti. When I bought the business from him, he didn’t want to teach me how he did things. He wanted to take that to his grave. But he finally taught me how to do everything—how to make the sauce, the ribs, the spaghetti, everything.”

  Try to dig a little deeper, especially concerning matters of recipe and technique, and Vernon turns cagey. “The base is the thing,” he says. “I can’t tell you what’s in it. The one thing that’s in it, I can tell you, is the oil from cooking the meat. You’d be surprised what you can do with a base like that and a few spices and things.”

  One look at a plate of his barbecue spaghetti and you will have no doubt that oil is a primary ingredient. Indeed, the plate glistens with it. As for the noodles, in the Italian tradition, noodles are cooked until they are al dente—meaning to the tooth. These noodles, on the other hand, are more to the gum—they nearly melt in your mouth.

  Topped with smoked pork shoulder and a zippy, tomatoey sauce, this culinary hybrid seems an unlikely challenger to the more traditional side dishes. That is, until you taste it. Soon after, you, too, will begin ordering a bowl of barbecue spaghetti as an entree, instead of a side dish. Soon after, you will find yourself in bed, during those precious moments before sleep descends, concocting a recipe for barbecue manicotti.

  1782 MADISON AVENUE / 901-272-1277

  Nashville

  MYSTERY OF THE MEAT ’N’ THREE MECCA

  For years I have tried to make sense of why Nashville is so blessed with great plate lunch places, why this middle Tennessee town is a meat ‘n’ three mecca, with more than a half-dozen great restaurants to choose from, while cities of equal or larger size—say Atlanta or Birmingham or Charlotte—can claim only a couple truly great lunch spots. And then it hit me: Nashville is a country-come-to-town kind of town, drawing backwoods pickers and small-town singers to Music City like bees to a hive. Out of the hills and hollers of Appalachia they came, guitars slung over their shoulders, dreams of a date at the Grand Ole Opry dancing in their heads. And with them came a host of friends and family, in town to trade in the city’s markets or visit their congressman at the state capitol. Doesn’t it stand to reason that they brought along a taste for the foods of their birth, the foods of the hills—salt-cured ham and skillet-fried corn, kettles of cabbage and pones made of sweet potato? And what is a meat ’n’ three restaurant after all, I mused. Why it’s nothing more than country cooking come to town, the noonday groaning-board feast replicated for the modern age.

  It was a good theory, or so I thought until I tried it out on my friend John Egerton, author of the wonderful book Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. Back in 1987 he had pondered the same question and come up wanting. Kind man that he is, John let me down gently. “I like the theory, John T.,” he said. “But it just won’t hold water, especially when you think about a town like Birmingham, that drew people from the surrounding rural areas to work in the steel mills and coal fields. Why don’t they have the same tradition of meat ’n’ three restaurants? No, I think this is the kind of thing you just thank your lucky stars for, the kind of blessing you chalk up to unearned grace.”

  ARNOLD’S COUNTRY KITCHEN

  In fine dining circles, tales of temperamental French chefs are rife. Neophytes who fiddle with the foie gras or diddle with the duck confit are sure to stir the ire of the guy in the white coat and pleated toque outfit. But who would expect such a burst of temper from a guy in a flour-streaked apron, the proprietor of an unassuming little brick rectangle of a restaurant, set amid a row of old redbrick warehouses?

  Meet Jack Arnold, a native of the North Carolina hills, with a dedication to fresh, honest foods that, in a just world, would make him as well known a cook as Julia Child or James Beard.

  On my first visit to Arnold’s Country Kitchen, I caught Jack in a foul mood. Indeed, he was cussing a blue streak. “Th
e damn fools I hired to clean my greens broke them!” he told me, as he worked to stock the serving line with the day’s specials. “I told them to strip the leaves. But dammit to hell, they snapped them right in half. I had some really nice purple tops and they just ruined them.”

  Like Hap Townes who once ran one of the South’s best lunchrooms in the shadow of the nearby Nashville ballpark, and the late James Lynn Chandler whose Sylvan Park Restaurant over in west Nashville still wins praise from locals for its vegetable plates and chocolate pie, Jack has spent a lifetime in the kitchen. And with each meal he serves, Jack Arnold makes a convincing argument that country cooking—collard greens and cabbage, fried chicken and meatloaf—is worthy of the respect normally accorded highfalutin French and Italian cuisine.

  He started out at the age of twelve, washing dishes. While studying fine arts at Vanderbilt University, Jack managed the campus cafeteria. Since 1983 he has been at the helm here, frying green tomatoes to a crisp, roasting monstrous rounds of garlic-studded beef to a turn, simmering fat butter beans in a swine-scented potlikker, baking pan after pan of macaroni and cheese.

  It’s all good, all simple, all Southern. Indeed, I would go so far as to posit that Arnold’s is among the best two or three plate lunch places in Nashville, which makes it among the best in the South. And, Jack’s protestations to the contrary, the greens were great, broken stems and all.

  605 EIGHTH AVENUE SOUTH / 615-256-4455

  LOVELESS CAFÉ AND MOTEL

  There has been a restaurant here on the southwestern outskirts of town, by the side of Highway 100, since 1947 when the Harpeth Tea Room opened its doors to the ladies-who-lunch trade. It took the Loveless family—Lon and Annie—to toss aside the tea and crumpets and transform the Loveless into a roadside restaurant and motel complex of modest dimensions and national renown. In 1951 they added a few rooms out back for guests, piled their breakfast plates high with salty country ham and billowy scratch biscuits, and erected a towering blue sign outlined in pulsating pink and green neon to let travelers know they had arrived at the Loveless Café and Motel.